Nobu and Tetsu await outside for Sato as they receive his message. ((@Nobu - No problem. I figure that probably happens a lot with your job.))

Round 1, phase 2

Sam manages to get rid of one of the vaginas, but his opponent remains on the offensive, marking him again and severely damaging his deck! Smoke is slowly starting to fill the limo as Sam's deck sparks and sizzles. ((6 matrix damage))

Before any further damage can be done though, Sato pulls the datajack from the suspect's deck. He does not appear to have any prosthesis or makeup on, but he does release a feminine yelp of surprise due to abruptly being yanked into reality. The Xena poke does seem to have brought paralysis from the neck down, but consciousness remains.

((Can our target speak? I was hoping paralysis included silence so we could extract her with minimal fuss. Presuming that is what happened))

Without breaking stride, Sato delivers a quick strike to paralyze his target and keeps walking down the aisle towards the restrooms in the back of the parlour. He guides her body so that it appears she collapsed against the pachinko machine.

The target, still paralyzed from the first strike, is not visibly affected by the second, but then one can only be so paralyzed and further strikes might start to shut down vital organs so it is probably best not to do that any further. While unable to move and still disoriented by dump shock, the target is awake and capable of talking. The coherency is somewhat limited though. Luckily the noise of pachinko basically means anything less than a full on shout is unlikely to be heard, much less noticed. The act of carrying a body out of the pachinko parlor is far more likely to attract attention than anything the paralyzed body could manage to do.

Given the noise of the place, whatever distraction Sato has in mind will have to be really flashy to capture the attention of the people inside.

((I wasn't intending to hit her a second time, just following continuity for the sake of the story))

Sato walks into the bathroom, looks around to ensure there's no occupants and drops two smoke grenades, counting on the smoke to simulate a fire and leak out into the parlour to cause panic...and hence his distraction.

Leaving the bathroom, he messages Nobu : "I've set off smoke in the bathroom - once the panic starts, grab our target and carry her out the door in the chaos."

((seems so, I'll have Tetsu do it, since he's quit and I feel less guilty about botting him))

Tetsu, having left his ax behind in the limo so as not to cause any more issues by walking around with a giant axe, slips into the pachinko parlor and manages to grab the mark and slip out with the crowd. Soon you are all back in the limo and making your way off to anywhere but here.

Your mark remains paralyzed for the time being and can easily be dropped off at Cowboy HQ for your reward whenever you want it. Until then, (s)he remains conscious and alert enough to talk despite the paralysis.

((it will last a minimum of an hour without healing. Likely much longer since Sato got such a solid strike on her while she was defenseless. If someone has a stim patch, Sam can be awake now. If not, then he will probably wake up before her paralysis wears off at any rate))

A sleek limousine pulls up to the curb, it's unusually deep black making it look like a black hole carving through the supernova of humanity exploding out of the pachinko parlour.

The squat, powerful form of Tetsu parts the river of panicked souls, an unconscious body slung across his broad shoulders, to all appearances the savior of an woman who succumbed to the vapors.

Sato rides the wave, not pushing through the crowd, but gliding with the surge, taking what it gives him. As he approaches the limousine, the door slides open smoothly and he and Tetsu duck inside one after the other.

As Tetsu deposits the form of the woman in the bench seat across from him, Sato mutters: "There's a stim patch for him in the medkit under the seat for him," and he nods to the slumped form of Sam next to him. "Once he's up, have him look through her 'deck...carefully."

Sato then leans forward and starts to frisk Roku, looking for datachips and weapons. His face is expressionless, an inch of ash forgotten on the end of his cigarette as he focuses on his task.

((Presumably, Tetsu applies the stim patch as requested))Sam's eyes flash open as the stim patch rips him from unconsciousness. His eyes well up as he struggles to fight back tears.

He curls up in a fetal position and whimpers. He's not having a full on meltdown, like before. But he's going to need a minute to compose himself.Though, he's still in the back of the limo, so he's probably curled up in his own dried saliva and mucus from before.

He reaches into his coat and pulls out his cyberdeck, which he clutches close to his chest and cuddles like a teddy bear.

((Sato probably wants to interrogate Roku, and so he likely will start while Sam is whimpering pathetically. So, Sato's next action might take place before Sam collects himself. But, in the interest of moving things forward...))

After a minute, Sam's pathetic whimpering stops. Another minute or so later, he sniffles and wipes his nose on his coat sleeve. He sits back upright and tries to key a few commands to his deck.

He frowns as he realizes that it is bricked. But, he doesn't lose his shit. Especially since there's another cyberdeck in the limo for him to play with. He picks up Roku's deck and keys in a few commands.

(( I'm going to do a couple rolls here, because I'm not really sure what I should be rolling. I want to know what deck I'm looking at. I think, work the customization available for cyberdecks, that will likely need a matrix perception. So, I'm going to roll a matrix perception to get just sort of a basic info of the deck. Is it safe to plug my data jack into another decker's deck? If there are traps that could be set that would be harmful to me plugging in, even though the deck is not currently locked and was being used before Roku was yanked out of it, I want to check for that. So, I'm going to roll a second matrix perception for that, in case the first one wouldn't cover it.

If that comes up safe, Sam plugs in to the deck and starts poking around. I'll do my rolls, and pick up there))

Sam has found this whole situation fishy, from the start. The Cowboys seem more eager to be rid of Roku than they reasonably should be. True, she's been embarrassing them. But Cowboys, more or less, putting a hit out on someone? And they seemed particularly unwilling to discuss details of Roku's crimes when he asked back at the station. Now that he has her deck, maybe he can find out a little backstory as to what's going on here.

He doesn't really know what he's looking for, though. So, he's just poking around in folders and searching messages. Before opening any files, he checks them for data bombs.

((I'm not sure if this should be a matrix perception, or a matrix search roll for poking around the deck looking for something interesting. But, they're the same roll. So this is whichever one is the relevant roll. And then I'll make a separate post of just a bunch of matrix perception rolls to be used for looking for traps))